It’s long awaited Wakes Week and the people of Bradford are heading to the seaside in their droves. While the factories are closed for essential maintenance, the hard working folk are seeking a bit of fun, sun and surf. And my word do these honest denizens deserve a holiday! Whether it’s the sands of Morecambe or the picturesque cliffs of Bridlington, you can be assured that they’ll be looking for a jolly good time.

But why travel so far? When just below the facade of our resplendent City Hall lies the Mirror Pool! So called, because on a fine day it reflects the city halls almost like a looking glass! So take a visit any day of the week, old chum. And you’ll be sure to be beside yourselves with glee!

During the day, especially in summer, it’s fantastic init. Oh, in summertime, yeah. Brilliant in summer! It’s like a beach. Oh, yeah, it’s definitely yeah. It’s like a safe beach. Just let the kids run riot. Yeah, and people just running through this fountain like, you know, we’re a swimming baths. Y’know, whatever weather people just be running through that fountain.

I wanna. Be beside. I wanna. Be beside you. (Running through that fountain.) I wanna be beside your side at the poolside.

(It’s like a beach.) Be beside your side at the poolside.

Ohhhh, I do like to be beside the seaside. I do like to be beside the sea. I do like to be upon the prom, prom, prom. Where the brass bands play. (And I swear, I seen ya mum!) So just let me be beside the seaside. I’ll be beside mesen wi glee. Bradford Mirror Pool! You can nearly fool you’re at the seaside, you’re at the sea.

When people come here, if they’re not from Bradford, they are… Wow – we didn’t expect that. Even if they only live in Leeds, they’ve come they’re shocked by it. They are amazed that we’ve got summat so nice. Yeah, ‘cause you get rainbows in summer don’t ya with it. Yeah. Early summer / late summer you’ll get rainbows forming in the fountains. That’s quite nice is that in’t it. Yeah it is. It is.

Be beside you, Babe. Be beside. I wanna. Be beside. Be beside you, babe. I wanna be beside your side at the poolside. Be beside you, yeah.

(That’s quite nice is that in’t it.)

Take a moment for water.

Take a deep breath in, and out.

Your cells are breathing.

As you breathe out water vapour is released from your lungs, and into the air around you. You can see it on a cold day.

Breathe in, and breathe out.

As you breathe in, the water vapour in the air around you becomes part of your body. It enters your blood stream, a network of life which flows through.

Look around you.

That person, over there.

They are moving with liquid, pouring weight between one limb and another to move in time and space. They too leak tears with joy, and with grief.

Breathe in, and breathe out.

Can you see water at this moment? Maybe the fountains are on, maybe the pool is still, maybe someone’s drinking in the cafe nearby.

Drink this in.

Breathe in, and breathe out.

Now close your eyes.

Feel your feet. Lift your toes, and relax them down. Tap your heels lightly upon the ground.

Below here is the tank of the Mirror Pool, where waters slosh. Under this pavement runs the Bradford Beck. It passes through this city on its journey from source to river.

Deeper down, beyond old pipes and cold stones, lies damp earth.

Breathe in, and out.

The oxygen we breathe is made by the algae which live in the seas so every breath is owed to the ocean. And just like you, the seas breathe. Their tides ebb and flow on the shores of the planet.

In…. and out…

And like you, their waters are merely visiting for a time.

For Water Is Neither Created Nor Destroyed, it is only ever transformed.

It is older than the sun, brought to Earth by comets and asteroids four and a half billion years ago.

So just like you, water has a body, a story and an age.

It is constantly moving.

Rising with the sun’s heat, cooling into clouds, gaining weight, and falling as rain, snow, sleet, hail. It runs over the land, down rivers. Forever returning to the sea.

This cycle is always happening, all around us, all the time.

The water in your body today may have been drunk by a dinosaur.

The water in your body today may have been a fog on the moors last month, a deluge of rain over the woods last year, a puddle on a quiet street last century.

And the water in your body right now will change shape again. It will be the ocean soon enough, a can of pop, a hot cuppa.

You are a relative of all damp things.

Now, ripple your fingers – and slowly, open your eyes.

Blink and drink it in.

Someone is walking past, thinking about something else, made of the same stuff.

Water cycles through all of us, all the time. It shapes the hills and valleys, makes and carves these stones, endlessly seeking flow.

As we come to the end of our journey together

Listen for the water.

You can take off your headphones and welcome the sounds.

You can see what’s going on for whatever angle.

Oh, we see everything here.

It’s a 360 degree in’t it. It’s so you can see what’s happening all over, at all times. There’s always somebody here.

Yeah.

And that’s seven days a week.

That’s our touchscreen. So when we play with the fountains, we can mek ‘em go higher, lower. But we also, we are now in control of all the lights. We call ’em twinkles, don’t we. People don’t realise that we change all the color sequences of the lights.

So the big one in the middle that’s Bradford Blast.

The Bradford blast is the biggest one in the UK. Hundred foot. About a hundred foot.

So if the blast is only running low, they put their feet on it. To try and stop the water. Well, if they’re looking down at it and you press that, it can actually make it just go straight up. And it’s watching them get wet and running away from it and [laughs] but then they always come back to it, don’t they? They get wet and then they come back as if to say “what’s just happened?” because they think they’ve triggered it. They think they’ve stood on a pad and it’s triggered it. So they come back to it and do it again. So it’s just, it can be a bit of a game, can’t it. Going round and doing silly things to people. Just…

Yeah.

Just to, I don’t know, just to add another element to it.

You get, a lot of young couples who hold hands and hands to walk under the arching jets.

Teenagers, early twenties – they come down and they don’t know how the fountains work. Sometimes they’ll stand in the middle, and then I press a button and then I get ‘em by accident.

By accident – on purpose, accidently. And we get premium viewing!

Yeah.

Perks of job!

We’ve got two new features have been fixed. So we’ve got the foggers, but we did have fire service turn up because people had rang the fire surface and said it’s smoking! [laughter]

Thought Mirror Pool were on fire.

Yeah – on fire!

Yeah, no it does, it does it because the foggers are like erm…

It’s like mist.

It’s like mist and it settles, so…

Yeah.

And it’s good when lasers are on it.

Yeah.

And then the other feature it’s the geysers. It’s like a borehole, y’know like a whale as it’s blowing the water out the hole? If you fill the pool up, and you turn all the fountains off and it goes still – then you get a reflection – of a mirror? That’s why it’s called the Mirror Pool. I’ve been here since 2012 and every day is a different day.

And every day we laugh. Every day we laugh.

Yeah.

There’s always somebody makes you laugh out there and that’s, you know, you don’t go home miserable because somebody makes you laugh.

That’s why I enjoy working here.

So when you look at Bradford City Hall, what you’re looking at is a building made of carboniferous sandstone. Approximately 320 million years ago. At that time, Bradford was not where it is now. Bradford was actually situated close to the equator. And these sandstones were deposited in a swamp, basically – fed by rivers. And since that time, this part of the Earth’s crust has migrated northwards, moved up from the equator to where it is today. It’s bloody slow. You know, it doesn’t go in the straight line. Continents tend to sort of collide and bounce off one another, crashing together and stick together and then break up and move off in a different direction.

And the stories flow. Downstream from meltwater to moorland tarn, hillside spring to trickling brook. Pitty Beck, Pinch Beck, Clayton Beck, Bradford Beck, Mucky Beck.

Got told that the beck runs under it. That’s why it’s damp here ont’ floor. Underneath – it’s carrying the beck. It’s touching the foundations here.

If it’s windy, it moves. So it’s like being, you’ll feel mildly seasick. When the tower moves around the weight. You’re only talking, you know, a few inches to one side and a few inches to the other. But it’s enough to make you feel a bit dizzy. It’s a huge musical box in’t it really.

Yeah, yeah.

And there’s four floors of machinery up there running it. You can’t just walk away from… and leave it. It will pull itself apart. An interrupted run train movement. Half a minute on the dial. So then it’ll wait 8 seconds. Then it’ll unlatch it. It’s very accurate in that sense, if it’s engineered well. And I think that it develops that torque just in case you get something, you know, like a pigeon stuck in between the two. You’re not rope-accessing it to pull out whatever’s there. It will just cut it in half. Yeah, we’ve got peregrine falcons up there. They bring their prey up and they tear it to pieces out there. So there’s a lot of bird parts, you know, from the remnants of what they’ve had for dinner out there. So…

Having been said and said and said again, this building is bigger than it looks. Our thoughts and sounds spill out, unlocking doors and tracing new lines of flight. This building grows beyond its walls and into the square outside. Its edges blur and loosen. It rises up and into the sky. It floats off into the fountains, catches rainbows in the mist and sun before falling back to earth with a slap.

Come and yell at the sound of the bell. The Great Bradford Yell took place on general Election Day. People were feeling really disconnected and worried, and it was a chance to come together and do something that was kind of open-ended, mischievous, fun. It was raining really heavily and a bunch of us met in raincoats and we weren’t quite sure what we were doing. And then, yeah, the clock went and then we just all like yelled our heads off for a few minutes. Joyous, really. We were all like, just really relished this chance to come and like join our voices together at this moment where so much stuff was going on. The idea was just to come and shout wordlessly and for it to mean anything that we needed it to mean.

Outside, we had a protest on the steps of City Hall and… had to happen outside City Hall because that was the place where the decisions were being made. It was kind of this place of tension.

The 35 statues of every monarch from William the Conqueror all the way through to Queen Victoria. My personal favorite is the statue of King John, who is holding a half unrolled scroll of the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta is one of the most celebrated documents in history – which guarantee that the king and the government were not above the law.

I think the Mirror Pool has been used completely differently to how it was ever envisaged. I don’t think anybody ever envisaged a hot, sunny day in the school holidays being full of kids paddling! I don’t think that was ever thought of as a possibility when it was built or when the idea was conceived. You know, it was meant to be something to be looked at rather than people actually going in and enjoying it. And it’s fantastic when that happens!

The guy screaming at a pigeon with no shoes and socks on – he was a fun guy. I don’t know what the pigeon had done, but he was very angry! And the pigeon only had one foot as well, so I felt a bit tight on it. But yeah, but just a normal day in Bradford really!

Yeah – and people just running through this fountain like, you know, we’re at a swimming baths.

I think just, you know, like looking at water is a really calming effect. Hearing the noise of water, like you can hear now… I don’t know, it’s just good for us wellbeing and it’s just good for our soul. I can’t quite put me finger on it.

Water, I think water, it does draw people – you see it when you go to the beach. The first thing kids or anyone does is they walk towards the sea. You know, they don’t walk towards the wall behind ‘em. You’re naturally instinctively drawn to water, and we are made up o’ water. We don’t survive if we don’t drink water. Erm, so it is essentially – it’s a life giver. And, you know, I think naturally in nature, everything survives on water. Everything needs water. So maybe it’s that.

To all and singular. We mark this place in our gathering. We listen with our bodies. This place exists in the minds of labourers born in rural Ireland. In the sweat of those awaiting trial. In the gestures of film stars. The officers, the citizens, the royal visitors, the grand viziers. The cooks, the prisoners, the porters. This place is public and private. It’s mine, It’s yours. This place is a constellation of elements, minerals, ideas, truths, myths. This place is an ongoing project.